“What?” Nick looked as surprised as I felt. I felt certain he hadn’t known.
“Nick has to leave,” I said. “I’m just going to walk him out.” I waved my finger in the general direction of all of them. “We’ll talk about this when I come back in. Don’t go anywhere. Please.”
“I’ll talk to you later,” Charlotte said to Nick, giving his arm a squeeze. She looked at me, and then her gaze slid to the front door, her way of asking me, without saying anything, to get Nick out.
I all but pushed Nick to the front door.
“Sarah, I had no idea,” he said. He glanced back over his shoulder at his mother, Rose and Liz.
“I believe you,” I said, “and so will they when they’ve had time to calm down, but for right now . . . just go. Please?”
He pulled his gloves out of his pocket. “Okay,” he said. “But call me if . . . if they decide to do something stupid, or . . .” He shrugged. “Just call me later, okay?”
“I will,” I said. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rose looking in our direction. If Nick didn’t move soon, I was afraid there was going to be a confrontation I’d just as soon avoid.
I put my hand on his chest and gave him a little push. It was that or hip check him through the heavy wooden door with its leaded glass window, and that seemed like a bit too radical. Rose was coming toward us. “Go,” I urged.
He went.
I made a beeline for Rose, draped my arm around her shoulders and turned her back around.
She tried to shake me off, but I’d been expecting that.
“Sarah, I wanted to have a word with Nicolas,” she said, clearly annoyed at me.
“I can see that,” I said. “I’m trying to stop you.”
“I can see that,” she retorted.
However, I was bigger than she was, so I frog-marched her across the room, reaching out to catch Liz’s hand with my free hand. “Are you all right?” I asked.
“Of course I am,” she said.
“Want to tell me what’s going on over a cup of tea?” I’d learned a long time ago that the three of them didn’t do anything without a cup of tea.
Charlotte passed behind me. “The kettle’s on,” she said, resting her hand on my shoulder for a moment. “I’ll go make a pot.”
I half turned. “Thank you,” I said. I turned back to Rose. “I’m guessing Mr. P. is going to join us?”
“Alfred is part of the team,” she said, a bit of a huffy edge in her voice.
“Go get him, then,” I said. Monday mornings this time of year were pretty quiet, so we might as well have our tea in the shop. I decided I could keep an eye out the front window for customers.
I turned to Liz. “Are you really okay?” I said.
“No,” she said. “I’m damned angry.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Are you going to try to stop us from looking into Lily’s death?”
I shook my head. “Nope. I know a waste of time when I see it.”
That made her laugh. “You are a very smart girl.”
Charlotte came down with the tea just as Rose returned with Mr. P., who was carrying a couple of folding chairs. Once everyone had somewhere to sit and a cup of tea, I turned to Liz. Elvis had wandered in from somewhere and was settled on her lap. “Okay. What happened?” I asked.
“Right after Avery left for school this morning, Michelle Andrews showed up at my door with another police officer,” Liz said. “She wanted to talk about what happened last Tuesday night, when you and I were walking to the car and Lily came out of the bakery.” She made a sweeping gesture with one hand. “They already know.”
“So you told Michelle what happened?”
“Yes,” Liz said. She was stroking Elvis’s fur, and he looked like he was following her every word, head tipped to one side. And for all I knew, maybe he was.
“Then she asked me about the conversation I had with Caroline.”
“Wait a minute. You went to Caroline?” Charlotte said, smoothing her apron over her lap. “I thought your disagreement with Lily was about the development.”
Liz looked at her and then reached for her tea and looked away. She was a little pale under her expertly applied makeup. “It was,” she said. “I just left out the part about talking to Caroline because you told me it was a bad idea.”
“I’m not saying I told you so,” Charlotte said gently.
Liz looked at me. “I explained to Detective Andrews that all I did was remind Caroline how important the harbor-front development could be for the town. I didn’t ask her to pressure Lily, and she didn’t really say anything to me, either way.”
“You said you’re a suspect,” Charlotte said. “What else happened?”
Liz took a sip of her tea and set it down before answering. “She asked me what I did after I left Sarah.”
“You went home,” I said. “Didn’t you?”
Liz nodded. “I did.” She was scratching the side of Elvis’s chin and he was leaning into her hand, blissed-out.
“So did you tell Michelle that?” I asked, tracing the inside of the curved handle on my cup with one finger.
“No,” Liz said. “I told her that if she had any more questions, she should contact my lawyer.”
Liz turned in her direction. “Because she was wasting time asking me questions that I’d already answered. Twice. She should be trying to figure out who really did kill Lily. She thinks I pushed that child down the bakery stairs over money?” She gave her head a shake. “That’s ridiculous!”
“So call your lawyer,” I said. “I’m guessing in this case that would be Josh Evans.”
Liz nodded.
“So call him,” I said, dipping my head in the direction of the phone, which was sitting on the counter next to the cash register. “Avery can corroborate that you were home and Michelle can move on.”
“Avery wasn’t home,” Liz said, bending her head over her cup again.
“Where was she?” Charlotte asked, leaning forward in her chair. Rose was studying her friend, a small frown adding lines to her face.
“She spent the night with Elspeth.” Elspeth was Liz’s niece, which made her Avery’s first cousin once removed or second cousin or something. She was also one of Avery’s mom’s closest friends.
“Liz, did you stay home all night?” Rose asked.
We all looked at her, but Rose kept her gaze on Liz.
“What kind of a question is that?” Liz grumbled.
“A question that deserves an answer, just like the ones Sarah’s been asking you.”
It hit me then that Liz had said that she had gone home, but she hadn’t said she’d stayed home.
“No,” she finally mumbled.
Rose and Mr. P. exchanged a look.
“Where did you go?”
Elvis was leaning against Liz and she was still stroking his fur.
“Nowhere really,” she said. “The house was so quiet without Avery and it wasn’t that cold, so I went for a walk.” She looked out the window for a moment. “I know it looks bad, but I didn’t do anything to Lily. I swear.”
I looked at Elvis, still contentedly sitting on Liz’s lap. Nothing in his demeanor said he thought that she wasn’t telling the truth—that was assuming his lying radar was working. Not that I needed anyone—human or feline—to tell me that Liz was telling the truth. I leaned over and put my hand over hers. “I know that,” I said.
“We all know that,” Rose echoed.
But how exactly was I going to convince the police?
“The first thing we need to do is come up with some legitimate suspects,” Rose said. “I think we need to know a little more about Lily. Did she have any enemies? We know a lot of people were angry because she wouldn’t sell the bakery. Have you all forgotten that?”
Liz made a dismissive gesture with her perfectly manicured left hand. “You really think someone here in town killed her over that?”
Rose’s gray eyes flashed with intensity. “You think that couldn’t happen? People have been killed over cheese, for heaven’s sake.”
“Cheese?” Liz repeated, the skepticism clear in her voice. Elvis’s ears twitched and he looked around. He liked cheese.
“Yes, cheese,” Rose said indignantly, color rising in her cheeks. “I read it online. It was somewhere in France. A man stabbed his next-door neighbor and buried the body in his basement. It was over some rare type of sheep’s milk cheese.”
“You think Lily stabbed somebody and buried the body in her basement and that was why she didn’t want to sell the bakery?” Liz asked. As if he could see where this was going, Elvis jumped down from Liz’s lap and came over to me, sitting down by my feet where he was out of the crossfire, and washing his face.
Rose made a face and set her cup down again. “Now you’re just being foolish,” she said. “The basement at the bakery is finished, all concrete and stone. Lily couldn’t have buried anyone down there. And where on earth would she find a curd knife in North Harbor?”
Charlotte looked over at me, a smile pulling at her lips. Rose and Liz were away, and if one of us didn’t stop the conversation dead, they could keep going for at least a half hour. I gave a slight shrug. I didn’t have anything.
“You know, the development isn’t the first time Lily has been at the center of a controversy,” Charlotte said slowly.
I looked at her again. “Excuse me?”
Liz was nodding. She tapped her cup with one pale turquoise nail. “That’s right. I’d forgotten about the business with young Caleb.”
“You weren’t here then,” Charlotte said to me. “It was, let me see, must be four years ago now. Lily’s ex-boyfriend, Caleb Swift, disappeared after taking out his sailboat, the Swift Current.”
I frowned. “What do you mean, disappeared?”
“He sailed out of the harbor, and about eighteen hours later the boat was found adrift. There was no sign of Caleb.”
I held up a hand. “Wait a minute. I remember Gram telling me something about that. There was no sign of a struggle on the boat, no blood, nothing out of place.”
“He was just gone,” Charlotte said.
“Caleb was a descendant of Alexander Swift,” Liz continued, “and his grandfather Daniel’s only heir. He was the golden boy of that family—smart, handsome, athletic, and he’d been sailing since he was six.”
Rose drank the last of her tea and set her cup down, her “discussion” with Liz forgotten. “Daniel Swift always believed that Lily knew more than she was admitting about why Caleb took his boat out the night he disappeared.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, leaning over to pick up Elvis. He settled himself on my lap and looked from me to Charlotte as though he were interested in our conversation. Maybe he was, for all I knew. “What does—did—Lily have to do with the disappearance of her former boyfriend?”
“He went to see her the night he vanished,” Charlotte said, setting her tea down on the small table between us. “There’s some security footage of him leaving the bakery, headed in the direction of the waterfront. It’s not very good quality. The Levengers had an old camera set up.” The Levenger family owned the Owl & the Pussycat bookstore next to Lily’s Bakery.
“A couple of Caleb’s friends seemed to think he was a bit obsessed with getting Lily back,” Liz added.
Elvis looked at me. I reached over to give him a scratch behind his left ear, and he started to purr.
“What did Lily say?” I asked.
“She said that Caleb had just dropped by to pick up some things of his she still had—a sweatshirt, a camera.” Charlotte shrugged.
“Caroline confirmed her story. She got to the bakery a few minutes after Caleb did.” Liz brushed a few cookie crumbs off her sleeve.
“She’s Lily’s mother,” Rose said, getting up and bustling around collecting the cups. “What else is she going to say?”
“You think that both of them were hiding something?” I asked.
Charlotte shook her head. “I don’t know.”
Liz handed Rose her cup and got to her feet. “What really matters is that Daniel Swift thought they were.”